Memory Lane

Several years ago, closer to the glory days of the atheism fad of the '00s, when I got a wider range of atheist trolls, I posed a basic question concerning one of their ideological articles of faith that poses a fatal problem for the validity of egalitarian democracy (atheism always seems to inevitably be at odds with egalitarian democracy if not in theory, in real life).   The problem was with the article of atheist faith that our consciousness is nothing but an ephiphenoemon of the chemistry and chemically generated electrical activity in our physical brains and that our minds, our thinking our ideas, our reasoning, etc. were absolutely dependent on the chemical and physical structures of our brain.  The most common conception of that in the real of pop-science is all tied up in a superbly naive conception of DNA and what it is supposed to do and, along with that, an as naive conception of natural selection.  Neither of which make the slightest dent into a problem I came up with for that model held from everything from university professors to the most ignorant of materialist, "skeptical" blog rats impressing each other with stuff they have been repeating like an unattended automatic alarm system for years and, in some cases, decades.

The problem I posed came in several parts.

A. If all of our ideas are the product of structures manufactured in our brains, whether those structures are "proteins" or "tissues" or some other physical encoding of the idea or, to those attracted by the even more ridiculous metaphor for our minds, encoded like lines of code in random access memory, then, 

B.  How does a brain know it needs to make a new idea which has no presence in the brain before that idea can exist in the brain?

C.  How does a brain know WHAT it needs to build to come up with the right idea before there is anything in the brain that has even informed it that something new is needed?

D.  How does it know HOW to build what it needs to build to be the idea needed or desired before that ideas is present in the brain?  Indeed, how does it even sense such a need or desire in that absence? 

E.  How does it know that it has built the right structure to generate the ephiphenomeon of the appropriate idea once it's made something?   This is especially hard to explain because, once built, what it has built, right or wrong, good or bad, that structure would be the only thing present in the brain to BE that idea.

F.  How do you come up with a proposed mechanism to do all of that, not only within the real time frame with which we come up with new ideas and implement them in use - such as a totally unexpected thing coming at you or which you've got to avoid hitting while driving - that could do what you propose it does in real time?   The resort to magically intoning "DNA" doesn't work because not only does the construction of a string of amino acids take time - the thing that DNA does - in order for those strings of amino acids to fold into the right shape to be biologically active anywhere in our bodies takes a considerable time, too.  The resort to magically invoking "natural selection" contains that problem because, according to the neo-Darwinian synthesis, natural selection is intimately tied to DNA and invoking natural selection would also introduce the problem of creating entirely novel structures to be ideas that have never arisen in the known history of life on Earth or, in human experience, in the history of the universe, ideas which are entirely unrelated to past or, in fact, present success rates of reproduction.  If they wanted to push that, I'd point out the potential of so many of science's newer ideas for destroying our species and, so, of rather likely maladaptive character unlikely to have generated success in the past. 

I bring this up because I was doing a bit of Spring cleaning listening to this lecture by the eminent research biologist Rupert Sheldrake talking about his hypothesis of morphic resonance and, at this point, he brought up something I hadn't read about or heard of, a similar problem for the idea that ideas are stored in some physical form in our brains.  After going through the problem that scientists have had in a century of trying to locate the physical address of ideas, he pointed out the idea that our memories (however they come to be there) are stored as in some library made of meat would require a storage system to retrieve the ideas as needed or wanted.  He didn't go into detail but having worked in libraries in my youth, such a retrieval system would have to be exquisitely precise, extremely rapid, constantly working and of unknown nature.

Rupert Sheldrake also pointed out: 

G,  that for such a retrieval system to rummage through the imaginary meat library in our brains would, it, itself, would need, have to have a retrieval system in order to find it, and that system would require its own retrieval system, into an infinite regression.  

I liked the problem so much I decided to post this little stroll down my own memory lane and tack it on to the problem I lined out and which no one has gotten past yet.  I don't expect any progress from the atheists who troll my blog, they don't so much progress as fall into habits of thought, mutually reinforcing habits of pretending such questions and problems aren't there or don't matter or are driven off by reciting the magical spells of current materialist-atheism, "DNA"  Natural Selection, among the stupider ones things related to Alan Turing or some other sci guy of the past they know not much more about than is contained in the more vulgar reaches of popular science.  The smarter ones are chicken and the stupid ones are, alas, stupid